THROUGH THE TRADES
While still in the S.E. trades we started our last long drill of all
hands on deck in the afternoon; the final clean-up for port was to be
a thorough one. Paintwork was scrubbed and, when clean as new ivory,
it was given a coat of fresh white paint, stroked on with the greatest
care. This done, the decks were again holystoned fore and aft; a most
thorough job. We then knocked about in the doldrums for a week or ten
days, and on Sunday, August 21st, we crossed the line for the last time
on that voyage.
Ordinarily one might suppose that this last leg of the long passage
home would be the most pleasant of all and that as port loomed ahead we
would once more feel the genial glow of good fellowship that blossomed
so warm upon our approach to Honolulu. But we were apparently nearing
a bleak coast; a hard material country where the sailor-man was on a
strictly commercial basis of so little per month, and more men than
billets; the crew would go, of course, and no one cared how much they
cursed the ship, for they would do that anyway. The grub was worse
because it was older; weevils were more in evidence than before, not to
mention other pests such as rats and cockroaches, and we were feeling
the effect of too close associations, a period of discontent, soon to
change, but at that time most trying. Also, it was hot, as hot as it
ever gets on the sea; our irritation became worse with every delay of
head wind or of calm.
Mr. Zerk, for reasons unknown to us, became exceedingly brash; he went
about looking for trouble, and always found it, working us without
mercy in the heat of the day, and horsing us about at night. His
relations with the second mate were strained more than ever, and some
of the men of the starboard watch came forward with a tale of a big row
between the skipper and the mate, the sounds having come up from the
after companion; of course, anything like that would never take place
upon those well-disciplined decks.
This succession of troubles had its climax one morning when the mate
set upon Chips, that most gloomy and industrious of all carpenters.
The lanky one, in returning from the poop with the running lights, had
through some carelessness allowed several drops of oil to smirch the
spotless planks.
"You dirty low-down bum! What do you mean by spilling that grease all
over the deck?"
"Ay spill nothing!" shouted Chips, his slow soul riled to the point of
protest at this latest insult.
"You didn't, hey? Well, _I'll_ spill something!" The mate jumped down
the ladder from the poop and made after Chips, who was in the waist.
Chips saw him coming, and as he had a heavy brass side light in each
hand, he was helpless. Realizing this, he started to run and reached
the door of the lamp locker as the mate came up to him. Chips turned,
dropping the lights, and as he faced the furious first officer, that
gentleman let drive a terrific crack with his right, fetching Chips
just below the ear, and lifting him clean over the sill into the lamp
locker. The mate went in after Chips and for a few minutes the place
was in an uproar. The mate stepped out, his hands covered with blood.
We were taking down the gear from the pins, after the washdown, and a
number of us stood horrified in the waist, a feeling of deep repulsion
coming over us. A big splotch of blood on the shirt front of the mate
must have come from Chips' nose.
The mate looked at us. He opened his mouth as if to bawl some order, or
hurl some epithet at the men of his watch who had witnessed the brutal
assault. Suddenly he turned round, and looked into the door of the lamp
locker, a small room in the after end of the forward house.
"Get a bucket of water and clean up this mess. It's a lucky thing you
didn't bust them lights when you dropped them." He was addressing
Chips, who came out of the door a moment later, hobbling to his room.
The mate went aft, washing off his hands in a bucket of water that
stood on the main hatch.
No one said anything, even in a whisper, but when we went below at
eight bells and were assembled around the kids, one of the boys spoke
up.
"Chips is cleaning up the lamp locker."
"I hope he reports Mr. Zerk to the Shipping Commissioner," I said. "If
he does enter a complaint he has plenty of witnesses. It will mean jail
for that bully, and he deserves it."
"Sure, he deserves to be hung," said Brenden. "But Chips will keep his
mouth shut."
"Why?" I asked.
"If he makes a squeal, this will be his last ship. Chips has seen worse
than he got, and should have kept his mouth shut. He gets forty dollars
a month, ten more than the second mate. The Squarehead's no fool."
"Well, I call it a dirty piece of work."
"Righto!" agreed Australia. "That rotten bull ought to be hung by his
thumbs."
While little was said about this particularly raw piece of brutality,
it made a great difference to us in so far as we seemed to realize, of
a sudden, that the fo'c'sle was apart from things aft, and that it was
just as well that we felt a little more agreeable toward each other.
The constant rubbing noses over the stinking grub, and the continued
driving, with no rest in the afternoons, made life anything but
pleasant while we lingered in the tropics. But the blood spilled by the
mate, as I have said, clarified our atmosphere forward.
Talk of the days to come again waxed plenty, and plans were gone over
and over in the night watches. In calm, we fretted and fumed, watching
and whistling for a breeze as though our very lives depended upon the
blowing of a gale. Hitchen, one calm Sunday afternoon, cut a cross in
the mainmast in order to bring on a wind; as this piece of vandalism
was done in the second mate's watch, and in a place where it could not
be seen without a search, no evil consequences ensued.
As on Sunday we got our watch below in the afternoon, word was passed
to us of the port watch, about the cross on the main mast, and in the
first dog watch I went aft and inspected it, pretending to hitch up a
coil of rope that hung inside of the fife rail. We lay with our head
yards sharp up to starboard, and the after yards back against the
starboard rigging, on the other tack, the courses were guyed out by
slap lines, and as the ship yielded to the gentle roll of the swell,
the reef points would ripple against the canvas in a way that sounds
different from anything else in the world.
We were speculating upon the efficacy of the cross.
"We will have a wind before midnight," declared Frenchy with positive
conviction, and during the dog watches we talked of nothing else.
Charlie Horse came out on deck in the second dog watch carrying his
Bible, with a quotation about the wind. "Thou hearest the sound, but
canst not tell whence it cometh," he read, "for the wind bloweth where
it listeth." Charlie Horse placed a deep significance upon the cutting
of the cross in the mast. The faithful became more and more perturbed
as the sun set and no sign of wind rewarded their belief in the cross.
We came on deck for the first night watch, and it was still dead calm,
the sky clear and the stars shining with extraordinary brilliancy. A
slight dew began to settle as the watch wore on and presently a sound
aloft of the flapping of a skysail started us to attention. Wind! But
where from?
Aft the mate and Captain Nichols were holding up wetted fingers trying
to feel the direction of the airs, that were undoubtedly stirring from
somewhere.
Frenchy used a different method, one I prefer to the wetted finger, as
it gives a more accurate sense of direction. He held his hand, palm
down, and with fingers slightly spread. By pointing the fingers around
the horizon, the slightest breeze will make itself felt against the
sensitive skin between the bases of the fingers.
"There!" cried Frenchy, his hand pointing broad abeam to starboard. I
tried it, and sure enough, I felt the slightest coolness between my
fingers. Indeed our paws were none too sensitive, being calloused and
hardened by many moons of hauling at gear, and from much anointing in
slush and tar pots. Presently things were moving aft.
"Port main; starboard crojik braces!" sung out the mate, and we walked
the yards around lively. The canvas began to belly out, and in a few
minutes our hot faces were fanned by a refreshing breeze. This was
the first touch of the N.E. trades, and by midnight we had our yards
trimmed with the wind close hauled on the starboard tack and the
_Fuller_ heading well on her course toward home.
When the starboard watch came on deck, Hitchen was all smiles, and the
wise prognosticators of both watches were well pleased with themselves.
They had got away with it by a narrow margin.
"I predicts that it's colder tomorrow," chipped in Australia.
"We got bean soup tomorrow, I bets," Scouse ventured, for in spite of
the vindication of Frenchy, Hitchen and the others, we let it be known
that luck was given the credit--luck _and the cross_. Most sailors of
those days believed certain things, and a cross in the mainmast was as
sure to bring wind, as a ring around the moon was a sign of rain.
During our last spell in the tropics, with our clear nights of calm,
Australia astonished us by his remarkable familiarity with the names
and constellations of the brightest stars. As I had a fair knowledge of
these from my studies on the schoolship, and also had my Lecky, with
the wonderfully simple star charts prepared by that master mariner, we
passed some profitable and interesting hours. Even today I never miss a
chance to glance at the clear sky at night and renew acquaintance with
the great stars of the heavens.
Australia had picked up his knowledge from a sheepherder in that far
country and knew the southern constellations better than I did. We all
know the Southern Cross, or at least have heard of it, and by the way
it is not much of a cross, though one of the two large stars pointing
toward it, _Alpha Centauri_, is said to be the nearest to the earth
of all the fixed stars. This is also a double star, but a powerful
telescope is needed to distinguish the separate bodies.
_Canopus_, another whopper of the southern heavens, ranks next to the
Dog Star, _Sirius_, and we never tired looking at these magnificent
gems of the night as they shone with living fire in the clear deep
blue of the tropic heavens. As I gaze from time to time at the
constellations, at _Cassiopeia's_ _Chair_, the _Great_ and _Little
Bear_, the _Swan_, and the giant _Vega_, at _Orion_, _Leo_, or the
_Sickle_, and _The Cutters' Mainsail_, I think of those days on the
_Fuller_ when we conned them in mute wonder, as sailors have in
countless ages gone before, and listened to the names by one more
learned than the rest. _Altair!_ _Regulus!_ _Aldebaran!_ _Arcturus!_
_Capella!_ _Procyon!_ _Sirius!_ _Spica!_ _Antares!_ _Fomalhaut!_
_Achernar_ and _Adara!_ what do these names mean to the modern human
calling himself educated? Since those days I have spent four years at a
university, and have drilled through the technical course in astronomy,
given to civil engineers, but I don't recall what was taught about
the great stars of the heavens that we learned to know by their first
names on that far off voyage. Of the present rank and file, who discuss
anything and everything smart folk busy themselves about, how many can
identify this company of noble names of the great blazing suns that
swing across the heavens?
And black nothingness is also to be found in the heavens, in the _Coal
Sack_, a blank space of the night sky, near the _Southern Cross_, in
the black depth of which no telescope has yet revealed a star.